The Need for New Antibiotics: Can We Talk About Alternatives to Patents, Please?

Saturday, 06 November 2010 08:54

Does the pharmaceutical industry prevent the media from discussing alternatives to the patent system for financing drug research? That would seem to be the case, since an NYT article on the failure of the industry to pursue the development of new antibiotics never once mentioned alternatives to relying on the current patent system.

It does not plan to offer government subsidies in addition to patent monopolies or proposals to make these monopolies even longer, but never considers the possibility that the research would simply be financed directly through public funds with all the findings placed in the public domain. Is there just a mental blockage here or is something else going on?

The obvious reason for not developing new antibiotics is because it will just result in more resistant super bugs that are immune to the next generation of antibiotics and so on.

If not for the economic rent earned by Big Pharma, competition would result in a viscious cycle of massive economic waste of new generations of antibiotics that just contribute to the growth of super immune bugs that would eventually wipe out the human race.

While socialists like Dean Baker do not appreciate the value of suppressing competition, teabaggers and Big Pharma realize that economics rents are literally the key to life and must be sustained at all cost.

The only way to avoid a death panel of next generation super immune bugs is to prevent socialist government interference that creates competition in a free rent pharmaceutical market.